A "calling center" is a facility having between 1 and 24 telephones, and constructed for the purpose of providing an area for the general public to make domestic and international telephone calls. The calls are typically paid for in cash or credit card, and in some cases, a calling or debit card may be used. Additional services may include copying, faxing, mail services, money transfer and more. The environment is manned, secured, and provides privacy for the telephone calls. Calling centers often appeal the to lower-income, immigrant or transient person who has not yet, or is unable to establish his or her own credit or his or her own home phone.
A typical method for the operation of calling centers is as follows: A person enters an arcade and tells a cashier he or she would like to make a call. The cashier assigns the caller to one of several booths containing a telephone by writing a booth number on paper. The caller then goes to the booth and makes one or more calls through a normal touch tone telephone set. At the end of each call, a record is printed at the cashier's desk which indicates the phone/booth making the call, the number called, and the length of the call. When the caller has finished, he or she returns to the cashier's desk to pay for the calls made from his or her assigned booth. The cashier then totals the records of calls made from that booth by manually pricing the calls based on destination and time. The cashier requests payment and the transaction is complete.
There are many problems inherent in operating a public calling center in this fashion. For instance, all the touch tone telephones are live and there are limited mechanisms to ensure that a caller uses the booth to which he or she was assigned. The pricing process of calls made for calculation of amount due is manual and subject to error. Additionally, calls are not billed to the caller until the end of the transaction, sometimes resulting in calls being made which are never paid for. Due to the manual process of recording transactions, bookkeeping and accounting for the operation of the calling center is tedious and inaccurate.
Another problem often encountered in operating a calling center occurs when a call is made but not completed, yet the phone rings beyond a designated grace period time. The typical calling center incorporates a PBX/Channel Bank solution for connecting the calls dialed to T-1 lines. A PBX, however, can not tell whether or not a call which it has connected to the telephone network has been answered. Thus, if a call record is produced by a PBX, the PBX assumes that a call was made for the duration of the call record. In a typical calling center, "grace periods" are used to calculate billing. A grace period is set in the PBX which is normally one minute long. Records produced that are less than one minute are thrown away while those longer than one minute are billed, regardless of completion. The result is inaccurate billing where completed calls may escape being charged, while incomplete calls might be billed merely because the caller allowed the phone to ring beyond the grace period.
The cost of operating a calling center with a current system is very high. Equipment required for a conventional system includes a small PBX or key system, a Channel Bank to connect the signals to an outgoing T-1 line, a call accounting or SMDR system to record the calls, a printer for the display of call records to the cashier, and the actual touch tone phones.
Although there are in existance systems which manage the operation of public modular telephones and systems which centralize or enhance the means of making payment for the service, none of these solve the unique problems presented by the operation of a public calling center.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,138,648 of Palomeque et al. discloses a system for the management of public modular telephones with means for making payment by using one of several types of cards such as credit, prepayment, and telephone subscriber or multiservice cards. The system disclosed contains a center for validation and billing of credit cards and telephone subscriber cards which validates, on a national scale, credit cards, telephone subscriber cards, customer black and grey lists, and receives system information and generates billing reports.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,233,647 of Palomeque et al. discloses a system for the operation of public modular telephones. This system provides a means to centralize alarm reports, supervises and controls validation units, adapting units and modular phones, and generates failure and service reports. The operating and management software include a number of maintenance functions including situation reports, traffic statistics, failure and repair control.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,595,983 of Gehalo et al. discloses a central office powered credit only telephone paystation. The paystation includes a reader to read the user's credit information which may be encoded on the magnetic strip of a conventional credit card. The paystation uses a microcomputer to process the credit and dialing information entered by the user. The paystation also allows the user to dial a plurality of nonrestricted numbers without having to use a credit card. The paystation is powered solely from the central office to which it is connected and keeps the transmitter turned off until it is needed.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,935,956 of Hellwarth et al. teaches a system of automated public phone control for charge and collect billing. In the system disclosed, the charge and collect-call functions of a public telephone are arranged automatically by a microcomputer system preferably connected on a customer premises between the phone terminal instrument and the local loop, wherein control of said instrument, network signaling and call placement voice prompting of the call parties, recognition of responses from the parties and the network, call detail records of numbers and timings and data communications with other computers are accomplished by the microcomputer system without requiring human operator assistance or the transmission of calls over excessive distances to reach such an operator.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,517,412 of Newkirk et al. describes a card-actuated telecommunication network. The network is constituted by a master control central linked to a group of satellites installed at different locations such as airport terminals. At every installation, the satellite acts as the hub for many local telephone stations equipped with a telephone and card reader adapted to scan the callers credit card. The signal from the originating local station is transmitted through the satellite to a verification processor at the central which determines the acceptability of the card. If the card passes this test, the originating station is advised and the telephone set is activated to permit the caller to call.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,065,393 of Sibbitt et al. discloses a system and method for controlling the cross connect field of a multi-locational switched network from a single location under the control of instructions from the end users. The system is designed to provide cost accounting and auditing information pertaining to the reserved time for each end user on a link by link basis as well as for the time during which the links were actually used for communication.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,897,870 of Golden et al. discloses a network implemented pay telephone set. For only selected user telephones numbers, the telephone system places a set-up call to a call processor to request billing and other information needed to process the call at the local processor. The set-up call is then terminated and the user's call is automatically re-dialed into the switched telephone network from the telephone central office which serves the telephone presently being used.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,387,278 of Hayes et al. teaches a maintenance facility for a telephony system with remote port groups. The telephony network is comprised of a digital central office and one or more remotely located digital satellite units. Each satellite unit connects to a number of remote subscriber lines and monitors these lines to establish communications through interconnecting spans and a digital satellite interface at the digital central office.